Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in Germany constituted our knowledge of the language, and these were on paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin’s own hand.  In the gloom of the diligence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had prepared me for, smoked over from all sides, it was a fascinating study.  Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while the light lasted.  When that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that we were in the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed, the tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals wrapping our immense companions reeked; fire occasionally glowed in their pipe-bowls; they were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate forces of nature.  I had most fantastic ideas,—­that I had taken root and ripened, and must expect my head to drop off at any instant:  that I was deep down, wedged in the solid mass of the earth.  But I need not repeat them:  they were accurately translated in imagination from my physical miseries.  The dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly hanged, or drowned wretches in a cabin under water.  I had one Colossus bulging over my shoulder!  Temple was blotted out.  His face, emerging from beneath a block of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderment.  Outside there was a melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over them grew steel-blue.  We were going through a valley in a fir-forest.

CHAPTER XV

WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST

Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of bread to dip in them, refreshed us at a forest inn.  For some minutes after the meal Temple and I talked like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided to our staring fit.  The pipes were lit again.  What we heard sounded like a language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in every mouth.  Dumpy children, bulky men, compressed old women with baked faces, and comical squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive.  We observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to require both his hands to hold it.  Whether the dog ever snapped more than his share was matter of speculation to us.  It was an education for him in good manners, and when we were sitting at dinner we wished our companions had enjoyed it.  They fed with their heads in their plates, splashed and clattered jaws, without paying us any hospitable attention whatever, so that we had the dish of Lazarus.  They were perfectly kind, notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great map of Germany to lie spread over their knees in the diligence, whilst Temple and I pored along the lines